ANGER (For Lucy Ellinson and Chris Thorpe)

[This is a post in several parts, the text of a talk I gave in Nottingham for World Event Young Artists. Scroll down to get to the very beginning]

It starts with being angry
This is always a good place to start

And I want to offer you two different minutes of anger

For the first of these minute
We are in the front room
Of a house in
A quiet corner of Edinburgh
There is thick carpet
And sofas
And Table lamps

But there are also other things
That you wouldn’t normally expect to find there
There are large speakers
And guitar amps
And mixers
And microphones
And a music stand

And we are more people than have ever probably squeezed into this living room before
People on the floor
And the sofas
And people standing squeezed into the kitchen area to one side
And everyone is watching
As three people
Make an incredible amount of noise

We are watching the wonderful performer
Lucy Ellinson
And she has just told us
about a writer
called Paul Reekie
And the two letters he received
One from the Department of Work and Pensons
Telling him his incapacity benefit had been cut
And one from
Edinburgh Council
Which informed him is housing benefit had also been cut
And Lucy told us how
Paul had laid this two letters out carefully on his desk
And then he had taken his own life
And she told us
That sometimes
One minute of silence is not enough
Sometimes you need one minute of noise
And that is what we are now listening to

And it sounds like a howl of unreason
It sounds like a fox with its foot torn off
It passes through us
And you can feel the sound
Like the physical thing that it is
I can feel my body
Moving with Lucy’s anger
And the room is crowded
And electrified
And I realise the important difference
Between
I am angry
And we are angry
And I realise that theatre is the perfect place
To transform
I am angry
Into we are angry
And whilst I am angry is always a good beginning
We are angry is where things get really interesting.

The second minute is by the writer Chris Thorpe
Who happened to be playing lead guitar
In the previous minute
This is a minute of words that he wrote for a project called
One Minute Manifestos
That Lucy recently put together for Battersea Arts Centre

Chris kindly allowed me to read this out today
I don’t sound as good as he does
But I’ll give it my best shot

Don’t waste your minutes in reason.

This is a minute.

Nobody was ever persuaded of anything in a minute.

Use the hours for reasoned argument.

Use the minutes for anger.

It’s OK.

It’s OK for your response to be.

Fuck this.

Fuck that shit.

Fuck it.

Just fuck it.

Because some things are wrong.

So let the luxury of a minute mean that you’re an absolutist.

Let the luxury of an hour mean the attempt to understand. The construction of a reasoned argument.

Let the luxury of a day, a week, a month be the craft of your art or your point of view, or sometimes,wonderfully, a synthesis of the two.

But the luxury of a minute is:

Fuck this.

Fuck you.

This is wrong.

Fuck you.

This is the wrong path.

Fuck you.

For suggesting idealism is adolescent.

Fuck you.

For treating the market like a human being.

Fuck you.

For encouraging resentment of the unlucky.

Fuck you.

For equating anger with shame and naivety.

Fuck you.

For smiling indulgently when you’re told you’re hated.

Fuck you.

For giving a man the opportunity to smear shit into the nation’s culture like he smeared shit into its TV.

Fuck you.

For making no sacrifices while preaching pointless sacrifice.

Fuck you.

For not asking ‘how can we make everyone healthy’, but ‘why should we’?

And fuck you.

I’ll take this minute for myself, thanks.

And I’ll offer you no solutions. Solutions are for hours and days and weeks and months. And those will come.

But this is a minute.

Fuck you.

So I want to ask you.
Are you angry?
And if you are angry
What are you angry about?
If you aren’t angry
Well, why not?

How do you make an audience not hear anger but feel it?
How do you transform
I am angry
Into we are angry,

I want to invite you to be brave enough to be angry about something in public
Be angry without apology and without elegance
Be angry even if it makes you red and stupid
If it makes you vulnerable and embarrassed.

Make something angry
Make it one minute long
Take one minute and make it yours
This is your time to be angry.

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[…] Anger can be channelled, it can be focused. Sadness is just draining. I want to be like this: https://lookingforastronauts.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/anger-for-lucy-ellinson-and-chris-thorpe/ I want to be that angry. That focused, that direct. That useful. But, instead I am perpetually […]

About Me

My name is Andy Field. I am an artist, writer, part-time curator, sometime academic and occasional polemicist who lives in Bristol. For the last five years I've been Co-Director of Forest Fringe with Deborah Pearson. Forest Fringe is an artist-led organisation making space for risk and experimentation at the Edinburgh Festival and beyond. Forest Fringe’s innovative community-led approach to supporting and collaborating with artists has allowed it to become a home to some of the country’s most exciting and radical new performance work.

I am also an artist in my own right, creating unusual interactive projects for a range of contexts. My writing on performance has been included in numerous publications including the Guardian, This is Tomorrow, The Stage and Contemporary Theatre Review. I've recently completed a PhD exploring the relationship between contemporary performance practice and the New York avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s.